We
are currently passing through an ugly crisis in our history, one of
the ugliest in recent times. At the center of this crisis is a
president who acts like a bratty child, who delights in rubbing salt
in the wounds of the people he insults, who blurts out anything that
comes into his head, who makes accusations without a shred of
evidence — let alone proof — and who ridicules any who dare to
question his words and deeds.

In
an obvious sense, the root cause of our political crisis is Donald
Trump. This crude and delusional man is despoiling some of our most
treasured national assets, not least of all our standing in the
world.

But
there are deeper forces at work in this crisis: divisions among our
people that are becoming almost tribal; the degradation of our
political culture by the coarsening of public discourse; and deep
structural flaws in our democratic process, for the fact cannot be
evaded: Trump lost the popular vote. A majority of American voters
did not want this situation to occur. And they do not want the
corrosive policies that Trump and his minions are currently forcing
upon them. Small wonder that people around the world are asking each
other what could possibly have gone so very wrong with America.
Small wonder that many of us are asking the very same question. This
series will attempt to put our plight in historical perspective.

There
are precedents for certain aspects of this crisis. Take the
presidential issue: disastrous presidents have come and gone, but
our nation survived their gross behavior. Warren Harding, for
instance, was vulgar and his cronies perpetrated scandals. But he
did have one redeeming feature Trump lacks: he was friendly and
charming and he tried to be a healing force after years of division.
Trump, on the other hand, loves to pick fights and to incite people’s
anger. He may well become the most fiercely-hated president in our
history.

Richard
Nixon was similar to Trump in a number of ways, for he too was a man
who sowed division, who trafficked in the politics of anger, who
degraded the presidential office. But Nixon — at least until the
very last weeks of the Watergate affair, when he was sometimes out of
control — maintained a fair semblance of cool self-possession in
public, even as he brooded and festered in private. Trump, on the
other hand, is nothing less than a wild man, a berserker. And he is
now entrusted with the nuclear codes that could eradicate our world.

There
are also historical precedents for the divisions that are making our
“blue state” voters and “red state” voters despise one
another from the very depths of their souls. Those who believe we
are dividing into the cultural equivalent of “two nations” are
ruminating nowadays — if only in a half-facetious way — about our
drift toward a state of civil war. And there are genuine reasons for
alarm. The California secession campaign is quite serious, and so is
the Republican counter-campaign that would split California in two.
Both of these initiatives are being pursued through petitions that
would lead to referendums.

The hatred that is poisoning our
public life almost seethes with incipient violence. Fighting indeed
broke out in a number of cities right after Trump’s election and
additional violence occurred on Inauguration Day. Then a shooter opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen in Virginia. We know that our political disputes have led to
violence before, and there are plenty of people right now who can
vividly recall that in the 1960s — a century after our first Civil
War — the great polarization in American life led to serious and
sometimes lethal violence. Violence also erupted in the final year
of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, when economic conditions led to
protests in
many parts of the country, including the Nation’s Capital. And
economic grievances resulting from the lingering effects of our
recent Great Recession played a role in the election of Trump.

Some
of the most interesting divisions in our politics have occurred in
the Republican Party, which is now more than ever in the hands of the
radical right. But Republican moderates — one has to observe that
there are very few Republican liberals anymore — are appalled by
the Trump phenomenon. John McCain, a previous Republican
presidential nominee, is perhaps the most prominent example of
Republicans who are alienated from their party’s current
leadership, and even former president George W. Bush, whose adviser
Karl Rove strove to worsen our ideological divisions in many
respects, has proclaimed himself to be distressed, sick at heart, as
he beholds the spectacle America is making of itself. Even outright
conservatives such as the pundit George F. Will are finding the
Republican situation under Trump to be morally intolerable. Both of
our parties have been fraught with divisions before, but the ongoing
crisis for Republicans — with the advent of extremists such as
Steve Bannon in the Trump entourage — hearkens back to election
year 1964 when the extremist politics of Barry Goldwater fractured
the Republican Party.

Current
anger at the Electoral College, which overturned the popular vote for
Hillary Clinton, is not entirely unprecedented, for the system has
served the United States badly on a number of occasions, most
spectacularly in the contested election of 1876, which had to be
settled through creation by Congress of an electoral commission to
arbitrate disputed returns. In the election of 2000, the popular
vote was overturned by the Electoral College amid another controversy
regarding contested returns, a controversy mooted by a peremptory and
(in the view of some) blatantly partisan decision by our packed
Supreme Court. But whatever the strengths of our constitutional
heritage — strengths such as the system of checks and balances
whereby Congress has some power to blunt the worst excesses of Trump
— the undeniable fact is that our current situation has arisen due
to flaws in the evolution of our constitutional system. For example,
the Electoral College is not working as the Founding Fathers
intended. The winner-take-all procedure for allocating Electoral
votes, which most states have adopted, has no basis whatsoever in the
text of the Constitution. And this pernicious system can nullify
millions of votes if a candidate carries a state by a razor-thin
margin

Other
weaknesses in our system are manifest if we compare it to the
workings of parliamentary systems through which “snap elections”
can occur if the electorate changes its mind. But in America we have
to wait four long years in order to correct a bad choice in a
presidential election unless the incumbent can somehow be removed
through the slow and excruciating process of impeachment.

This
series will explore such issues through a sequence of thematic
articles that will analyze our current plight and its causes — one
by one. The series will conclude with some bold speculation in
regard to the best-case futures and the worst-case futures that are
looming just over the horizon.